oil prices rising, people still want oil. The higher the oil price, the higher we pay for gas. The price of gas impacts how much and how far people travel these days. It affects us all in one way or another. The sad thing is that nobody can do anything about the limited supply of oil left. Oil prices fell below $130 a barrel today on a growing sense that soaring gas and oil prices have cut demand for fuel during the normally busy summer driving season.
At the pump, meanwhile, retail gasoline prices rose, but only slightly, leading to renewed speculation that gas may follow the normal seasonal pattern of peaking around Memorial Day, then declining over the summer.
http://www.reuters.com/article/hotStocksNews/idUSN2321534820080525
Police said they saw and shot the animal four times but every time it disappeared, running between houses and jumping fences. Gilleylen also hit the bear with his patrol car but the animal kept running. Ray Yager, 23, and a buddy were on their bicycles when they saw all the police activity and were told about the bear. A little bit later, the bear was shot.
http://wwww.examiner.com/a-1394458~Battle_Creek_police_shoot_bear_who_strays_far_from_home.html
The earthquake that struck Sichuan Province on Monday has so far claimed more than 19,000 lives across China, and thousands more people remain missing or trapped beneath rubble. Their grief is caused by most of the people that died are children. The child's parents were not even allowed, by the government, to help search for their child.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/15/world/asia/15morgue.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
The death toll has continiued to rise after the cylone hit. The number of missing people has also risen. The government in Myanmar will not let the US provide aid to some of the victims.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/world/asia/07myanmar.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
A manatee in Panama and a porcupine in South Africa both have things in common. Elated and exhausted field researchers, first and foremost.
Both mammals, until recently, presented prickly challenges for scientists whose mission to find and track these animals is not an end in itself, but rather is a means to help conserve entire ecosystems.
Research efforts supported by the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund in two biodiversity hotspots – Mesoamerica and the Succulent Karoo – met this year with success. Because of that, one manatee and two porcupines now sport satellite devices that allow scientists to track where they go, and when.
http://cepf-stage.industrialmedium.com/xp/cepf/news/newsletter/2008/april2808_manatee_porcupine.xml
Deforsestation in this area has caused animals to become extinct and the climate to have changed. Where will future mills be built? Which forests will be converted to feed those mills? All of those decisions will determine the fate of Indonesian forests.” Of course the most recognized of these are the Sumatran elephants and tigers.
http://cepf-stage.industrialmedium.com/xp/cepf/news/newsletter/2008/april0108_Sumatraforests.xml
This story talks about how a tornado hit Florida. It talks about the damage left behind. It also talks about how the meteorologists were trying to decide if it was a tornado or not.
http://news.jacksonville.com/justin/2008/03/07/tornado-hits-lake-city-possible-twisters-in-baker-heavy-rain-pounds-area/
A partnership between BirdLife International and the Nagilogilo Clan of Vatuira has resulted in the successful eradication of Pacific Rats (Rattus exulans) from this internationally important seabird colony, BirdLife International Fiji reports.
Vatuira – a small island located 15 km from the coast of Fiji’s largest island Viti Levu – is an Important Bird Area (IBA) for several seabird species, including 28,000 breeding pairs of Black Noddies (Anous minutus). “Ground nesting species such as Bridled Tern (Sterna anaethetus) and Black-naped Tern (Sterna sumatrana) have been observed raising chicks on Vatuira for the first time since the eradication was completed,” said Don Stewart, Director for BirdLife International in the Pacific region. It is now hoped that these species, and others, will establish significant populations on the island.
http://cepf-stage.industrialmedium.com/xp/cepf/news/newsletter/2008/march0608_Vatuira.xml
When the image of this species was first seen, the photographer knew he had never seen anything quite like it before. It was the size of a small dog, covered in orange and gray fur, and had a long snout like an elephant. Its markings and general appearance suggested it was a member of the elephant-shrew family, called a sengi in Swahili.
http://cepf-stage.industrialmedium.com/xp/cepf/news/newsletter/2008/jan3108_Shrewdiscovery.xml
The sickest patients may be one step closer to having a replacement heart if new rat research pans out for humans. Researchers at the University of Minnesota created a beating heart using the outer structure of one heart and injecting heart cells from a different rat. The journal, Nature Medicine, reports their findings. This procedure takes a heart and breaks it down to its outermost shell instead of building a heart from scratch with the use of stem cells.
http://www.cnn.com/2008/HEALTH/01/14/rebuilt.heart/index.html

